Non-commissioned Exempt Accommodation

Debate between Ruth Cadbury and James Daly

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Daly]

The right hon. Gentleman raises a fair point.

As I said in my intervention on the shadow Secretary of State, the motion says the sector is being impacted by

“a chronic shortage of genuinely affordable housing, reductions in funding for housing-related support, new barriers to access for single adults requiring social rented housing”.

I agree. For a single person in my borough it is nigh on impossible to get any accommodation whatsoever. As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Julie Marson), I battled for 16 years to get housing for clients with the most acute social problems. I told court after court that unless these people were put somewhere with appropriate support and stable accommodation, the sentence imposed by the justice system would be pointless, because they would come back. I said the same thing time and again, and nothing ever changed.

We must be open and honest, and we must not be critical. We have to think about how we can improve the housing stock in all our boroughs. When I start my contribution by saying that we do not have enough housing for people in my borough, there is clearly something wrong and we have to do something about it.

We have a plan called “Places for Everyone” on Greater Manchester’s strategic housing need. It has been submitted to the Secretary of State, and I am sure it will come across the Minister’s path at some point. Such documents will affect all our areas, and certainly the areas that the shadow Secretary of State and I represent, for years to come. In a document of well over 300 pages, I can find virtually no reference to social housing or social rented housing. This is our strategic housing plan to meet the needs of individuals in Bury and elsewhere.

Throughout my 10 years as a councillor in Bury, I said that our housing stock is far too expensive. It costs more than £300,000 to buy a three-bedroom house in the vast majority of my constituency in the north of England, which is beyond people, certainly people with support needs. There is a glaring and obvious need to build social rented housing and genuinely affordable housing in Bury. There are brownfield sites in the borough that could be used for this purpose, and we still do not have it. We can talk about sticking plasters to address the problem, but we also have to focus on the long-term strategy to overcome it.

The only such provision in Greater Manchester’s strategic plan for the next 25 years says:

“Make provision for affordable housing in accordance with local planning policy requirements, equivalent to at least 25% of the dwellings on the site and across a range of housing types and sizes (with an affordable housing tenure split of 60% social or affordable rented and 40% affordable home ownership)”.

In a document of many hundreds of pages, that is it. That is literally it. There is no bespoke plan—the shadow Secretary of State has disappeared—whether it is in Wigan, Rochdale or wherever it may be. Unless we have that plan, social rented housing will not be at the centre of public policy. Local authorities cannot run away from this. The temptation of local authorities of all political persuasions is always to blame the Government for everything.

[Ruth Cadbury]

Is the hon. Gentleman not aware that local authorities cannot put anything about social rented housing in their strategic plan without a Government commitment to fund it? My council, Hounslow, is building 1,300 council homes, almost all of it from the council’s own proceeds. That is it, and the council is doing it at a slower rate than the right to buy. Even at this rate, the council is losing council homes because it does not have the funding from central Government. We were building hundreds of thousands of new council homes in previous decades because they were funded by Conservative and Labour Governments, and he needs to be challenging his Government to do that now.

[James Daly]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention, but, in respect of Greater Manchester, I think she has answered her own question. If what she says is the case, what an indictment it is of the Labour councils in Greater Manchester that they have not even bothered applying for the Government funding that would underpin that long-term strategy. I have been a councillor for a long time and we have been asking them for that strategy, in order to take advantage. I could cite the billions of pounds that are available to support these strategies, but Labour councils in my area—[Interruption.] Heads are being shaken, but Labour councils in my area have made no effort to address this problem. I want to take this opportunity in this Chamber to encourage my local councils to be as proactive as the hon. Lady’s.